Born in Lille in 1857, Louis Dollo completed a degree
in Civil Engineering in 1877, and spent five years working as a mining
engineer. In 1882, he began work at the Brussels museum, in order to
pursue his passion for palaeontology. He was it seems a rather quiet,
dispassionate fellow. His peculiar style of writing, as he put it "a
consequence of a strong mathematical education" was lacking in fluidity,
to say the least. He was also a firm believer in the reductionist
principle that there were fundamental forces that guided the organic world
as it did the inorganic, and as such theorised that evolutionary forces
could not be reversed.

Fossil
discoveries

Louis Dollo was lucky enough to be working at
the Museum of Brussels in 1878, when a total of thirty one Iguanodon
specimens were discovered 321m deep in a coal mine in Bernissart. They
were of what we now know to be two separate species, I. mantelli (smaller,
as found by Gideon Mantell in the Weald) and I. bernissartiensis (specific
to this site), although Dollo at the time could not discount the
possibility that the size differences were due to ontogeny or sexual
dimorphism. In somewhat juxtaposition, the skeletons had to be assembled
in a local church, as the museum was not large enough to house them.

The discovery of such a large quantity of well preserved bones
allowed Dollo to redescribe Iguanodon as bipedal, as opposed to Richard
Owen’s now defunct quadrupedal models. It also showed that what were
previously thought to be horns were in fact thumb spikes, used presumably
for defence.